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“We had a lot of rabbits jump out of the hole the last couple weeks,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said, referring to the many requests for changes that he and co-author Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) fielded while working out a unanimous consent agreement so the bill could move this summer.

“Johnny and I have been working on this our whole lives,” Murray joked. The last year in particular, Murray said, has been spent “hammering through challenges.”

House Republicans and Senate Democrats have very different agendas for workforce policy. A bill that passed the House last year focused primarily on getting rid of workforce programs, many of which were deemed redundant in a 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office.

The Senate’s version of the bill, which passed out of committee in 2013, maintained most of those programs and focused on other priorities, like helping dislocated youth and updating the system for people with disabilities.

Workforce law is unwieldy to reauthorize: It’s dense and complicated and touches a range of competing interest groups, including businesses, unions, skills-focused nonprofits, disabilities advocates and higher education.

The long delay between the original passage of the Workforce Investment Act in 1998 and the recent reauthorization efforts added to the challenge, said Allison Dembeck, director of congressional and public affairs for education at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“The longer it waited, the more we were realizing how much it had to change. That really made the process difficult,” Dembeck said. “The more changes that you need, the harder it is for consensus.”

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act works to solve a familiar problem: unemployment. It governs a web of federal programs meant to train people and help them find jobs. Its reach is vast: WIOA authorizes employment centers that help with resume writing, job searches, English as a second language instruction and on-the-job training. It has specific programs targeting particularly vulnerable groups, such as laid-off workers and disabled veterans.

WIOA also authorizes GEAR UP grants to improve college access for disadvantaged youth. And the bill governs a system that trains disabled youth for the job market. WIOA would work to steer these young people away from separate employment centers, called sheltered workshops, and towards integrated jobs.

It all amounts to several billion dollars of jobs training, but the patchwork of programs the bill governs are widely seen as dated and have been increasingly vulnerable to funding cuts.

The bill the Senate passed Wednesday represents a modest update. Lawmakers and advocates often cited their desire to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” as they pushed to reach consensus.

Democrats and advocates such as the National Skills Coalition, for instance, had hoped the bill would prioritize partnerships between businesses, higher education and the workforce development infrastructure.

But Republicans did not want to add new programs or layers of bureaucracy. The resulting compromise puts a softer focus on the partnerships.“It’s not going to drive the change we want to see,” said Rachel Gragg, federal policy director at the National Skills Coalition, which supports the bill nonetheless.

The Obama administration’s priorities also took a hit. President Barack Obama has touted the Workforce Innovation Fund, which rewards innovative approaches to skills training. The program would be eliminated under WIOA. The administration expressed disappointment about the fund Wednesday but said it supports the bill regardless.

And though many senators were able to make changes to the bill, not all got everything on their wish lists. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) also wanted changes to the bill that they withdrew at the last minute, Isakson said.

Murray emphasized that moving the bill has been “a work in progress,” and said she and Isakson included ideas from other senators to help them feel like they could “own a little bit” of WIOA.

The bill now heads to the House.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who authored the House version, said she is “cautiously optimistic” about the bill’s future. There have been no changes in the Senate that may derail it, she said. The House could take up the bill this summer but likely not before the July recess, Foxx said.

Isakson said he hoped the bill could pass under suspension of the rules in the House, which requires a two-thirds vote, if it got “a good vote in the Senate.”